Should we have a 'real' blog available for each OWW user, using wordpress for instance?

Jason R. Kelly 09:45, 7 June 2007 (EDT): Austin and I have been discussing this via email, I'm moving it here to get more input.

Jason R. Kelly::how hard do you think it would it be to give users blogs through OWW? you think it will be a disaster? Or should I just sign up for blogger?

Austin:It depends on what kind of a blog you are envisioning. These are the possible solutions I can think of:

each user signs up for a different blogging service. no integration at all.

run wordpress or similar and do some kind of integration with oww. You get whatever bells and whistles of 'real' blogging software but it becomes a bit disconnected from the wiki

blog on the wiki itself. good integration. The only question is what features of a blog you really want and whether it's easy to implement on the wiki. The basics like showing the most recent posts is easy (e.g Blogs) but Mac says it's not a blog because "it doesn't look like a blog." I don't know what that really means but even if we dewikified it and put some skin on to it e.g. [1] it may still not be a 'real' blog. RSS feeds should be doable using the filtered recent changes. User comments are easily doable if we want to install an extension. Other features I don't know about.

Jason R. Kelly:Yeah, I think you need to be an actual "blog", e.g. calendar on the side, place for comments, etc. Plus people will want to use stuff like feed burner to keep track of who subscribes, how many hits they get, etc. All the exciting stuff about self-publishing! If you don't have that, you lose some of the incentive. So i like this option:

run wordpress or similar and do some kind of integration with oww. You get whatever bells and whistles of 'real' blogging software but it becomes a bit disconnected from the wiki

Austin: Like I said, these features are just code. For example, if we run our own wordpress, we'd also have to use a plugin to get feed burner to work. Getting it to work with the wiki almost certainly isn't that much more difficult. In the end, almost any feature could be implemented on the wiki, so feature list shouldn't be an issue. The primary difference is a psychological one. On a wiki, you are implicitly saying that anyone else is welcome to come and edit your post.

Jason R. Kelly:Open question is would users actually use this rather than blogger? http://scienceblogs.com/ is an example -- the bloggers can only customize the header graphic, o/w all the blogs look the same. Don't know if something like this would be popular w OWW users, but we could find out.

Austin: I see no reason to run our own wordpress farm. Why not just have everyone blog on scienceblogs? What's the benefit of connecting it with OWW in this case? The only benefit of us hosting it if we're going to implement closer connections with the wiki (e.g. perhaps can use wikilinks) but in that case, it seems easier to implement on the wiki.

Jason R. Kelly: ScienceBlogs handpicked bloggers to be in their group, I can't get a scienceblogs blog. The benefit for OWW is that we will be encouraging scientists to communicate freely. Some people would be more comfortable with a blog than the wiki since it's "their voice". It seems possible that a scientist who wouldn't go sign up for blogger might click a blog link from their OWW userpage and start blogging. This may not be true, but I'd like to run the experiment.

Austin: I see. So we'd have to make an extension to the wiki no matter what to at least add a blog link.

Jason R. Kelly: I don't know whether it would be more work to make the wiki look like a blog, and have all the features of a blog, rather than running a wordpress farm. Any idea which would be harder?

Austin:I have no idea how hard it is to run a wordpress farm but in the end it just means an extra piece of software to manage, separation of the information out there, and in general it means people need to go to multiple sites to get their information.

Wordpress is about 51,000 lines of code (as a comparison, mediawiki is 234,000 lines of code). The benefit(?) of wordpress is you get all those lines of code and they get updated for you. The disadvantage is the complexity it adds and what we have to maintain. Most of those lines of code probably overlap with the wiki's functionality.

I think if we wanted to, it wouldn't be hard for a tech to implement most of the essential features of a blog in a wiki in a very short time (could probably copy lots of code from such as things like trackback). I can't imagine the wordpress farm being that difficult either. But in my mind, using the wiki is a cleaner long term solution.

Jason R. Kelly:Why is it important to integrate it with the wiki? To have it show up in recentChanges?

Austin: Just like you said that scientists may not sign up for another blogging service, having it actually on the wiki means they don't have to learn another interface and other things that go with it. I don't know how complicated wordpress is to set up and administer, but do users really want to mess with different blog settings, skins, etc (if they do, then we should definitely go with wordpress).

Austin: The other thing is if we're looking at blogs, forums, etc., aren't we looking at just running a CMS like drupal that can do them all together?